Some of our wisest political observers informed us that Brexit would be great news for Donald Trump, because it shows (somehow) that there may be more support here than expected for his nationalist message of restoring American greatness through restrictionist immigration policies and turning the clock back on globalization.

So it’s a bit surprising to see that a new Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll shows that Brexit will not influence the votes of a majority of Americans, and if anything, may benefit Hillary Clinton marginally more than Trump:

“A majority of U.S. voters — 57 percent — say they don’t expect the U.K. verdict will influence their vote in the presidential election. For the roughly quarter who say it will, almost half say it will make them more likely to support Democrat Hillary Clinton, while 35 percent say Republican Donald Trump.”

This is only one poll, so don’t place too much stock in it, but I wanted to highlight it to make a broader point: There is simply no reason to assume that the debate over globalization, which Trump joined with abig speech on trade yesterday, will automatically play in the Donald’s favor. Indeed, Trump is running a massive scam on American workers on many fronts, and the contrast between his positions and those of Hillary Clinton on trade and other economic matters may prove more important in the end than his blustery rhetoric.

Neil Irwin has a good piece this morning on Trump’s big trade speech, in which he pledged to rip up our trade deals with his large and powerful hands and to bring manufacturing roaring back. As Irwin notes, Trump is right to highlight the very real possibility that trade deals have badly harmed American workers, and that elites have in many respects let those workers down. (Bernie Sanders, too, isrightly calling on Democrats to fully reckon with this phenomenon.) But as Irwin also notes, Trump is selling American workers a highly simplistic, anachronistic tale that doesn’t level with them about the likelihood of reversing trends in globalization and automation

I’m certainly no fan of NYT columnist Thomas Friedman—he of “Go for the Grand Bargain, President Obama!” and “Michael Bloomberg for President!” fame. But his column today is, in my opinion, exactly right.

The first several paragraphs sum up what has become clear to everyone following the news on the Brexit-vote aftermath: that the leaders of the Brexit movement harbored no compunctions about selling it with lies and gross distortions because they didn’t expect their campaign to actually end in, well, Brexit. And that now that that these dogs have caught the car, they have no idea what to do with it. They have the car keys but don’t know how to drive the car.

This certainly is why, as Sargent points out, the Brexit vote itself has not helped Donald Trump and instead appears to be helping Clinton slightly.

But the remainder of Friedman’s column addresses the separate issue—and clearly, it is that—of the reasons why so many Britons and Americans and citizens of several other Western countries are susceptible to the type of simple-elixir manipulation that apparently many Britons now regret that they fell for.

Friedman writes:

Because although withdrawing from the E.U. is not the right answer for Britain, the fact that this argument won, albeit with lies, tells you that people are feeling deeply anxious about something. It’s the story of our time: the pace of change in technology, globalization and climate have started to outrun the ability of our political systems to build the social, educational, community, workplace and political innovations needed for some citizens to keep up.

We have globalized trade and manufacturing, and we have introduced robots and artificial intelligence systems, far faster than we have designed the social safety nets, trade surge protectors and educational advancement options that would allow people caught in this transition to have the time, space and tools to thrive. It’s left a lot of people dizzy and dislocated.

At the same time, we have opened borders deliberately — or experienced the influx of illegal migration from failing states at an unprecedented scale — and this too has left some people feeling culturally unanchored, that they are losing their “home” in the deepest sense of that word. The physical reality of immigration, particularly in Europe, has run ahead of not only the host countries’ ability to integrate people but also of the immigrants’ ability to integrate themselves — and both are necessary for social stability.

And these rapid changes are taking place when our politics has never been more gridlocked and unable to respond with just common sense — like governments borrowing money at near zero interest to invest in much­-needed infrastructure that creates jobs and enables us to better exploit these technologies. “Political power in the West has been failing its own test of legitimacy and accountability since 2008 — and in its desperation has chosen to erode it further by unforgivably abdicating responsibility through the use of a referendum on the E.U.,” said Nader Mousavizadeh, who co-­leads the London­-based global consulting firm Macro Advisory Partners.

But we need to understand that “the issue before us is ‘integration’ not ‘immigration,’” Mousavizadeh added. The lived experience in most cities in Europe today, is the fact that “a pluralistic, multiethnic society has grown up here, actually rather peacefully, and it has brought enormous benefits and prosperity. We need to change the focus of the problem — and the solution — from the physical reality of immigration to the political and economic challenge of integration.” Schools, hospitals and public institutions generally will not rise to the challenge of the 21st century “if social integration is failing.”

Which brings me to another current conflation by much of the punditry: that Bernie Sanders has squandered his clout by waiting to endorse Clinton until after the party platform is completed, by which time most of his supporters already will be planning to vote for her, swayed partly by Trump’s simple awfulness and partly by Elizabeth Warren, who has started campaigning with Clinton.

That analysis misses two key points. First, Sanders’s supporters who are not so thoroughly horrified at the thought of a Trump presidency that they have not yet decided to vote for Clinton care a great deal about the policies they will have some reason to believe will be enacted, or, conversely, blocked, by a Democratic White House teaming with a clearly ascendant and finally-high-profile progressive wing of what hopefully will be a Democratic-controlled Congress.

Second—and a point I’ve made repeatedly in my posts here at AB—there are two types of Trump voters or potential ones, and only one of these will matter to the outcome of the election. Suffice it to say that the Build the Wall and Ban Muslims voters in the South and Southwest are not the ones who will matter.

The ones who will are Democrats in the Rust Belt who support much of Sanders’s proposed platform and are now considering voting for Trump. And whose vote could turn on such things as discussions about what political consultants wouldn’t dream of advising their clients to discuss, but that Sanders did discuss during his campaign: hostile labor union policy, including NLRB member appointees; antitrust enforcement; banking regulations that reign in the political power of the financial services industry generally and the mega-banks in particular; the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau—what it is and does.

Free tuition at public colleges and universities. Guaranteed access to healthcare. Guaranteed medical and family leave, for the cost of $1.50 a week in, yes, taxes. Increased Social Security benefits, in recognition of the demise of defined-benefit pensions.

As so many pundits note, and as Sanders himself says, the Sanders campaign has achieved a great deal in the general outlines of the party platform. The process has been like pulling teeth, but still ….

But one of the Clinton campaign’s super PACs, I read a day or two ago, is about to flood the internet with ads reminding people that Trump is a misogynist—because apparently there are three or four voters who, although they already know this, will decide against voting for Trump after they’re reminded of it yet again.

And the Clinton campaign itself, I also read, has ads running on TV in some swing states apprising voters that in the ‘70s and ‘80s Clinton pushed some policies that helped children in Washington, DC and in Arkansas, and that as First Lady in the ‘90s she devised and helped push through the CHIPS healthcare insurance plan—not a trivial thing, by any stretch, but also not relevant to voters’ current concerns about this candidate and about the likelihood of major change of the sort so many people who badly want major change want.

Those who continue to cite Clinton’s popular-vote margin over Sanders in support of resistance to this overlook the critical fact that it was, until late in the primary seasons of both parties, broadly believed gospel that an economic populist could not win the general election—and that that, not some broad antipathy toward populist economic policy proposals, tells the tale of that popular-vote differential. It is, for example, unlikely that a majority of African American and Hispanic voters oppose free public university and college tuition. And universal, Medicare-like healthcare coverage. And a $15/hr. minimum wage. And guaranteed medical and family leave in exchange for a $1.50 weekly tax. And the reduction of the size and economic and political power of the largest financial institutions.

Polls have not been taken on this, to my knowledge. That’s too bad. But in any event, Rust Belt voters considering voting for Trump despite rather than because of his personality and offensiveness would not be among those interviewed in a poll limited to Clinton primary voters.

The real hope for the Clinton campaign lies not just in showing Trump for what he is, not just regarding his temperament, breadth of ignorance, and breathtaking grifterism, and not just the Build the Wall and Ban Muslims policies that everyone already knows about, but also in apprising the pubic of his actual proposed fiscal policies. And Paul Ryan’s. And also every bit as much in Clinton’s appearing comfortable with the fact that her campaign’s car was caught by the Sanders dog.

And in seeming fine with allowing that dog’s tail to wag her campaign, to a very large extent.

The fallout from Brexit is already being recognized by U.S. voters as a warning about gullibility and a belief that any dramatic change is better than no or little change. Turns out that some of the positive changes Britons were promised already have been withdrawn, and the changes that cannot be withdrawn aren’t particularly promising ones. But as Friedman’s column makes clear, the status quo in the remaining EU is untenable, too, and the EU leaders now recognize that. So there is a silver lining after all to the Brexit vote. It’s just not one that helps Britain. But in addition to helping the remaining EU members, it could help the Clinton campaign.

Finally, the Clinton campaign is being forced, by Trump’s speech yesterday on trade, to actually educate the public about Trump’s actual fiscal and regulatory policies. Well, more accurately, it is Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, the source Trump cited more than a dozen times in that speech, who is doing that. In spades.

Painful though it may be for the Clinton campaign to see someone who has the attention of the news media apprise the public that Trump’s fiscal and regulatory policies are long those of the Republican Party elite and Republican elected officials at every level of government—the very mission of which has been to crush ordinary workers, duly accomplished—it looks like it will have to suffer this indignity.

Which is better than having to do this themselves. Anything is better than having to do that themselves. For some reason.

Comments (6)

ilsm

June 29, 2016 5:04 pm

Clinton needs a better tag line than there are “more crooked people than me”.

Beverly Mann

June 29, 2016 5:54 pm

That’s certainly true, but I would think it would also be true for Trump. The only reason it isn’t is that most people apparently don’t know how crooked he is. It’s been in the news, but most don’t know the specifics because every time something major about it breaks, Trump quickly buries it under an avalanche of stories about his latest outrageous statement. And Clinton and her campaign don’t educate the public about the specifics because, well, y’know, she’s a woman and that’s why we should vote for her, and Trump just said this or that.

J.Goodwin

June 29, 2016 5:09 pm

I heard part of the CHIP ad last night driving home (in an NPR story).

I found it a very strange ad. First because the tone seems targeted to remind you that HIllary Clinton is female, and that this is somehow a reason to vote for her over Trump (maybe for women this is true?), but more because dredging up the deeds of the 1990s is a reminder of a lot of the things that people DON’T LIKE about Hillary Clinton. The policy “interference” of an UNELECTED (and indeed also not subjected to the “advice and consent” review normally applied to cabinet members) person — regarded at the time as having a lust for power — in the process of proposing legislation and regulations.

That stuff is among the major contributors to her negatives. Reminding people about it in a calm and reassuring tone probably isn’t all that helpful.

Whether the policies were good or not is beside the point, the problem was how she got in the garden by the back door in the first place.

Beverly Mann

June 29, 2016 5:49 pm

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Clinton’s campaign is still–still–campaigning, even if maybe slightly more subtly, on the fact that she’s a woman, since that and that alone was the justification for her campaign from the outset throughout. And since they’re simply programmed by a 1990s algorithm that they’re too clueless to recognize as counterproductive: It just highlights how out-of-touch she is with this economic-populist campaign cycle.

This crowd is just stupid if it actually believes there are women who care about the gender/glass-ceiling issue but are on the fence about voting for her and need to be reminded of her gender one more time. They really have no idea why so many people don’t like her, so they keep doing things that drive home the things people dislike about her. That for all her glass-ceiling-shattering big-dealness, she’s where she is because of whom she married, as you note. And, most important, that while they don’t doubt that she cares about kids, they do doubt that she cares about the economic-populist issues that they care about. And that she is interested in the slightest about changing things more than just slightly.

It’s hard to overstate how dumb these people are that they think that anyone who will vote for her against Trump on the basis of gender hasn’t already made that decision.

I expect that she will win despite her own profound lack of appeal to so many people and the utter stupidity of the campaign she’s running, but only because of who her opponent is.

ilsm

June 29, 2016 7:02 pm

Bev,

Trump did not vote for perpetual war nor have a 30 year connect to Robert Kagan.

I first voted in 1972.

The enduring lesson of Nixon: if he was crooked working for Mc carthy the spots don’t change.

Applies to HRC.

terrry

June 30, 2016 8:39 am

As best I can tell Hillary is winning and it would appear that Trump is not positioning himself well to close the gap. Under the circumstances, I am sure Hillary is perfectly content to let Sanders dither around and become totally irrelevant. That does not mean his positions are totally irrelevant, because plainly he channeled a wave of populism that also explains some of Trump’s appeal and it is those who have been left behind economically and largely ignored by Democrats and Republicans alike–Remember Obama was ready to sacrifice social security as part of his “Grand Bargain”. Certainly being left behind was part of the support of Brexit, but it was not policy driven. It was more of “well screw you if your not going to share lets just blow the whole thing up”. Tweet today from a 59 year old Brexit supporter to the effect “what do I care about what happened to the stock market, I do not own any stock.” Brexit should be a wakeup call to both the Democratic and Republican elite in this country, but I see no reason why it will color the campaign for president this cycle. While some Trump supporters might not be Trump supporters if Obama had managed to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour, they are not going to switch to Hillary because she says she will fight for it. The very reason they are Trump supporters is that they have lost all trust in the establishment of both parties. That means the campaigns will not be policy driven as much as us elites might prefer that but, instead will be the same attack-counter attack that we have been witnessing for the last month. Only if Trump starts making inroads with non populist driven groups–who might be susceptible to policy arguments–will Hillary change. As to reminding people she is a woman, that is her strongest card. It is the same reason that Trump keeps reminding people he is a white supremacist.